Kobe Desraumaults
To underline the absolute value of Kobe Desramaults it would be enough to retweet René Redzepi’s tweet on January 3rd 2013: «This year, sooner or later, we should all eat at the In De Wulf, a restaurant worth keeping an eye on». This is for two reasons: the famous tweeter’s prestige but also his unwillingness to point the lights somewhere else.
After all, Kobe’s potential – by coincidence, his name is the same as that of the world’s most precious beef – is not too far from the matter with which Renè’s dreams are made of: he has an almost total symbiosis with local producers, in this almost unreachable part of Flanders, within a stone’s throw from the French border. Every day he talks with excitement with fishermen from the North Sea, with the farmers of the fossil dune of Ghyvelde, with the vegetable in his own garden, with the seaweeds on the nearby sea-bottom. And this talk is then transferred into 5 languages to the band of chefs coming from everywhere who today fillet and cut on the counters of Dranoutier’s kitchen.
Desramaults started to put this dialogue diplomatically together in 2005, after returning from a long journey which brought him, at 20-something, to the court of Sergio Herman in Olanda, to have his mouth watering in front of Michel Bras's gargouillou, and to the e al Comerç 24 in Barcelona, breathing the Adrianesque breeze. Upon returning home, he gave a significant makeover to the old brasserie run by his mother (with eight rooms upstairs), surrendering, straight away, to the rules of rustic design imposed by the Great North. Belgian critics very soon noticed him and his progressive cuisine. No, not in the Genesis’s sense, but in that according to which "There’s still lots of progress to be made, before getting to the top". Meanwhile, at that same top, they have noticed him. And that’s no small thing.
At the end of June, the turning point: leave In de Wulf and return to a concept of primordial cuisine (just embers, grill and wood-fired ovens) with Chambre Séparée in Gent.
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